Internationally acclaimed ceramicist Betty Woodman, who pioneered ceramics-as-fine-art, working in a studio in Italy. She died on Jan. 2, 2018, in Italy at age 87. The former University of Colorado professor was the first living woman to be given retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Betty Woodman, an internationally acclaimed ceramicist who notched several historic firsts in the art world, died on Jan. 2 at the age of 87, according to Salon 94, her New York-based gallery.

The cause of death was pneumonia, the gallery said.

Provided by Salon 94

Betty Woodman

Woodman, who pioneered both ceramics-as-fine-art and female representation in the art world, taught in the art department at the University of Colorado for three decades and still has many prominent pieces on display in Colorado — including “Balustrade” at Denver International Airport, on the north and south bridges of Level 6 in Jeppesen Terminal.

“Betty was an early pioneer in the world of ceramics,” said Alissa Friedman, a partner at Salon 94, which represented Woodman since 2010. “For over 60 years, she created a hybrid of sculpture and painting which was highly inventive and unmistakably contemporary.”

Never content to view her work within the confines of the decorative arts or craft, Woodman pushed the medium into the realm of fine art, Friedman said, challenging the norms of a sometimes rigid, male-dominated art world.

“When Woodman began making ceramics 70 years ago she, like most ceramicists, created utilitarian objects,” said Rebecca R. Hart, the Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum. “Her domesticware became legend in Boulder, humble objects sold from her studio and yard. Woodman was confident working with the quotidian, and through it she discovered her genius, a vision that propelled her to international fame.”

Courtesy photo

“Floating Kimono Vases” (1992) are among signature works that were on view in a Betty Woodman retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

At the age of 76, Woodman became the first living woman to enjoy a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She was also the first (and so far, only) artist with Colorado ties to do so.

“She just broke down all the barriers,” Dianne Vanderlip, the Denver Art Museum’s former curator of modern and contemporary art, told The Denver Post in 2006. “Before Woodman, you weren’t allowed to use ceramic and call yourself an artist. You weren’t allowed to be from Colorado and have national or international aspirations. You weren’t allowed to paint on clay the way she did.”

Woodman and her late husband George — also a prominent artist and photographer, who died on March 23, 2017 — lived and worked in Boulder for a part of every year from 1956 until her retirement from CU in 1998, according to former Denver Post art critic Kyle MacMillan. They then split their time between New York City and Antella, Italy.

Woodman’s career followed “a slow but steady upward arc, beginning with her first studio sale of pottery in Boulder in 1957-58,” MacMillan wrote. “She unquestionably ranks among the five most accomplished artists ever associated with Colorado, and she might even head the list.”

In Woodman’s practice, humble clay was formed into objects that seemed to dance and soar, “to become figural and limitless,” the Denver Art Museum’s Hart said. “This impulse is enshrined in ‘Somewhere Between Naples and Denver,’ ” which is part of the museum’s collection.

“When I started out, ceramics was not even a material you made art out of,” Woodman said in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. “People might have liked what I was doing, responded to it, bought it, eaten off of it, but it had nothing to do with being an artist – it was about being a craftsman.”

Woodman continued innovating late into her career: Her first solo exhibition in the U.K. happened as recently as 2015, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. A year later she was commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial to create a permanent work for the city, a 50-foot-wide fountain mounted to the base of a Grade II-listed art deco ventilation tower, according to The Art Newspaper.

Born in Norwalk, Conn., on May 14, 1930, as Elizabeth Abrahams, she married George Woodman in 1953. Their daughter Francesca Woodman, a feminist photographer, killed herself in 1981 at the age of 22. Their son, electronic artist Charles Woodman, survives.

Woodman won dozens of awards and fellowships throughout her career, ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Rockefeller Foundation and Fulbright-Hays Scholarship.

Her local impact can be seen in not only the quality and variety of ceramics in galleries and museums in Colorado, but in the ceramics department at the CU’s art school, where the Woodman Study Collection resides.

True to Woodman’s spirit, the hands-on collection she founded features pieces acquired over decades of living and teaching in Boulder.

“The collection has two large glass cases of displayed work and a room with a study table for closer observation and handling of ceramic objects,” according to CU Boulder’s website.

“It took a long time,” Woodman said of her international success, “and I think it does for most women. Certainly if you look at the artists you know who are more or less my age, how many women can you name? I don’t think there are very many.”

John Wenzel has covered comedy, music, film, books and video games for The Denver Post for more than a decade. As a proud Dayton, Ohio native, his love of Guided by Voices is about equal to his other obsessions, including Peter Jackson's Middle-earth, "Mr. Show" quotes and Onitsuka Tigers.

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